Yesterday was the official start of the Sydney filmfest…online version. Wednesday night is also the night of our weekly online trivia with friends so we decided to stick with that and watch some shorts afterwards. Famous last words.

I was curious how it was going to work and the FAQ supplied by the fest was a little light on detail. I initially tried casting from my new laptop to the TV and could not find the TV on the network. Then tried running it on my android phone and still couldn’t cast and the phone browser for the SFF site wanted me to download the SHIFT72 app which I did. Except that the SHIFT72 app didn’t have any SFF content and SFF have confirmed this morning they’re not using SHIFT72 to deliver festival content.

We then tried using the built in browser on the TV itself (the TV is running full android) without success and was again asked to download the SHIFT72 app. Last resort was to try a cabled HDMI connection from my laptop to the TV. Of course my new laptop only supports USB-C so I dug out my old laptop (which mostly works) and used its HDMI connection. Took a bit for the TV to recognise it but we got there in the end and were able to watch a couple of good shorts.

Failure points: me trying to troubleshoot tech issues after a whisky or two meant I got increasingly frazzled. Thinking about it in the light of day, I have a vague recollection that I need to switch on casting on the TV itself prior to casting from the laptop. Will test that this evening. A further thought this morning re USB-C, I do have a USB-C to USB-A converter which means I potentially could plug the new laptop into the USB-A port on the TV. I may even have a USB-A to HDMI converter, if so that could work too though curious as to the effect of having two chained converters.

Troubleshooting network stuff is a little tricky at the moment as I’m running wifi channels on both the old router and the new Orbi mesh setup. The TV is on the old, the laptops are on the new which shouldn’t be a problem as other things work. The new setup is piped off the old router and the plan will be to switch off wifi broadcasting on the old one eventually. I need to keep the old router in play as the Orbi gear doesn’t have a plug option for landline telephones and the old router does.